The lesson is that your ability to remain anonymous drops in almost direct proportion to the quantity of content you make available.

A careful user might have a more-shallow slope; they might be able to post more photos, if they're carefully scrubbing EXIF and being mindful of spillage (unintentional details in the frame). But every single posted photo is still inexorably eating away at their potential to remain anonymous.

After publishing the first picture, you might have to throw away the camera... You never know how much unique is the fingerprint of the camera. Might be very useful to crawl profiles to map photos and screen names.

You wouldn't have to throw it away, just label it with the identity that posts photos from it.

...and not use that camera for anything other than posts made with that identity.

I happen to know where the bad pixels are in one of my digital cameras. Not sure of the other.

Even when I take photos of interesting stuff, I'll find an alternate source rather than post mine.

Different cat photos!

Unless we all standardize on the same cat photo. officialcatavatar.com anyone?

Limecat. Been around for ages, ready for battle.

... from the most generic search term you can imagine.

Damnit, you're on to me, aren't you.